Welcome to Retail Reckoning, the podcast from Retail Champion where we explore the real challenges facing our high streets and town centres. In this episode, I’m asking a burning question at the heart of yet another government regeneration scheme: will the new multi-billion pound "Pride In Place" programme transform our towns, or is it just déjà vu with taxpayer money at stake?

Drawing on my own experience with these schemes, I reflect on previous initiatives like the Portas Pilots and the Future High Street Fund, and I share first-hand insights from towns like Market Rasen and Gainsborough.

I’ll break down the current retail landscape, consumer confidence, and the policy decisions on the horizon that could make or break our high streets. If you care about the future of your local high street—or just want to know what needs to change to make regeneration stick—this episode is essential listening.

So go ahead and click play now!

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Pride of place or a waste of taxpayers money? It remains

to be seen.

Let's be honest, it's starting to feel a bit like deja vu on the

high street. There's been another big Government announcement in the last couple of weeks.

It's another shiny new initiative, a promise to revive town

centres. This time it's called the Pride In Place programme,

with all sorts of talk about community auctions, local

powers, billions in funding being farmed out to hundreds of high

streets. That sounds great, right? But the question is,

will this be transformation or just yet another waste of

taxpayers money? We've been here before.

In 2011 and 2012, we had the Porters Pilots.

That was £100,000 won by each of 13

towns who'd promised projects to reinvent the high streets by

developing markets or updating the look and feel

of the place. Shortly after that came the Future High

Street Fund under Grant Shapps, the then High Streets Minister.

That launched in, I think, 2013. It was around a billion

pounds distributed between 72 towns. And it was all about

modernization, diversification and rebuilding. But

we're now over a decade on and we're still talking about the same

things. We've still got vacancy rates, disjointed planning and volunteer

burnout. Because it isn't about the money that fixes these

places, it's about the capability of the businesses,

the collaboration between them and relevant and appropriate

support from local authorities and destination marketing organisations.

So let's have a case study on this. This is quite an interesting one.

I've been working with West Lindsey District Council for the last five years under

various different programmes of business support. But the first time I went up to

Market Raisin was to be a judge for their window dressing

competition. Now, Market Raisin was quite a

surprise. They were one of the Porter's pilot towns and their whole pitch

was about, let's put the market back in Market Raisin.

And that was a great idea. So they won the Porter's funding.

Further down the line, they also won the High Street X Fund. Now, if

you know Market Raisin, you'll know there's a racecourse, quite salubrious.

And there's a very lovely, quaint little market town,

but there's not much else around. It's a very rural area off the

beaten track in Lincolnshire, a good half an hour's drive or so to

Lincoln, about 20 minutes to Gainsborough. So there are bigger towns not

too far away that pull the local population out of Market Raisin

to go shopping and doing their entertainment elsewhere.

People do come into the town, but the racecourse is the draw and that's on

the edge of town. So putting the market back, that sounded like a great plan.

They had the funding from the porter's pilots and they had a volunteer team,

town team as it was called back then, if you remember that. And they had

the energy, but the funding went towards things like securing

market stalls, the storage, the delivery, the

putting up, taking down and so on. And that exhausted the fund

quite quickly. The logistics were quite hard. There was a lot

of work involved and the volunteers were all unpaid. When you

think about that, these are real people with real full time jobs or businesses to

run. And what happened was volunteer

exhaustion set in. And this happened across town. Teams

up and down the country and even CICs that were set up,

community interest companies were set up to deliver destination marketing. A

number of them have gone out of business and entered administration because there

just isn't an unlimited fund available and people need

to be paid. So regardless of the effort and the heart,

the town team disbanded. So that quarter of a million pounds and maybe

more of taxpayers money was spent with no

sustainable impact. And that isn't a failure from

lack of passion, it's a failure through lack of structure

and lack of recognition that to do things properly you have to do things

professionally. And that means paying people. So here's what I'm seriously worried

about. I hope and pray that pride of place doesn't follow the same playbook.

History shouldn't repeat itself. There's been another flurry of press releases

and people saying yes, it's great, it's great, lots of short term

enthusiasm. But then will there become exhaustion and decline

because where the country is now, we simply can't afford that.

Let's remind ourselves what the retail and high street landscape looked as we ended

September. The ons were reporting that in August retail

sales volumes rose by 0.5% month on month and

0.7% year on year. But the three months to August volume

fell by 0.1%. So that really means that August's

growth wasn't growth, it was all about inflation

and something to do with the warm weather making some demand.

The BRC told us that retail sales were up

3.1% year on year. But that again is mostly driven through

food and drink inflation. Non food, which is the

discretionary spend heartland was only 1.8% up. So

really what we're seeing is shoppers are spending more just to get the same

basket. Then there's consumer sentiment. The

GFK consumer confidence index fell from

-17 in August to -19 in September. Every

single measure dropped the confidence around personal finances, major

purchases, outlook to the economy. So households are clearly

tightening their belts before peak season and maybe they're already

hoping and praying that Black Friday delivers the goods quite

literally. The most worrying One was the

OECD's forecast that UK inflation was at

3.5% and that's the highest in the G7.

The slower growth is expected in 2026 and

food prices are rising, Trump tariffs are biting and global

uncertainties everywhere, with wars popping up and

disruption in the globe. When all those

issues arise and the news is selling us

a story of trouble here, trouble there, worry about this, worry about that.

What actually happens is despite if it is

truly affecting consumers or not, confidence drops.

That means that they're less likely to spend. So the

opportunity for retail to recover is much limited.

So we need to look forward and be realistic, but not be too

depressed by what's going on in the world at the moment. We're heading into the

end of October and towards November, and really

this is the month that sets the scene for the Golden Quarter.

October gives us Halloween half term and a run up to Black

Friday. As we enter November, because Black Friday, one day, it's now a whole

month, they're all going to tell us the stats from these

sort of events and consumer activity is going to tell us how confident or

cautious the public really is, because if the families pull back on

discretionary spending, it'll hit fashion, home and gifting

categories first. If footfall holds up,

it'll be thanks to things like clever place marketing, local events and

experiences worth leaving home for, particularly with the

nights drawing in and the autumn weather biting.

So really for retailers, local authorities, business improvement

districts, destination marketing organizations and anyone involved in place management,

now's the time to double down on what really drives performance.

And from my point of view, that's people. Well trained people,

sharp presentation, great windows, good layouts, great point

of sale, clear pricing that consistently gets

across the value proposition and reliable stocking levels. Because

you can't buy what you've not got, customers are making

fewer trips to the shops, but when they do shop, they want it to be

worth it. So, thinking a bit more about this whole

place focus and what strong place management means, what it means to retailers,

what it means to the community, and how that links back

to boosting thoughtful consumer confidence and of course, pride in

place, I'm going to talk a little bit about another town in West Lindsay that

I've had the pleasure of working with and that's Gainsborough. I started working with

them five years ago, as I mentioned, and the town was looking

rundown, a little shabby, and it needed an

injection of love and care and attention. But over the last couple of years the

town's been completely transformed and this has been a real

significant concerted effort between the local authority and the

businesses and the community to make a

difference to the place. So they've got public realm improvements,

more greenery, nice signage, they've got some pretty finger posts as well as

other signage that make it just feel easier to get around the place if you

are a visitor. They've got some free parking available and they've

really updated the visitor experience. A new cinema has been

created in collaboration with one of the cinema operators which has helped

to maintain Evening Footfall, which had a knock on benefit

to the evening and nighttime economy and hospitality and leisure.

And the best bit was their shop front restoration programme.

Now we've seen with the pride of place, that there's a

strange suggestion that we would

have places auctioning off long term empty shops. But to

who? But moreover, that the local community, in

a sort of a board of decision makers, will be able to determine

if operators can trade from a place. What we had in

Gainsborough was I think like a gaming arcade, a couple of betting shops,

a couple of vape shops, and we all know they don't look particularly

elegant necessarily and for a lot of people they don't like that

type of shop. But we have to accept that if they can survive and

they're paying the rent, their rates and their staff and the taxes and everything else,

if that's what people want, if there's demand for that, we shouldn't be so quick

to push them out. Whereas under the new powers, the new community powers, under

pride of place, those kind of businesses would be pushed out or

potentially vetoed. Now Gainsborough has a number of those

businesses, but with the shop front restoration program they look nice.

And there's this amazing post on LinkedIn if anybody's interested. Look at the West

Lindsay District Council page, scroll back a while and they've got

photographs of the before and after that have been animated and it's

profoundly different. And shops that you might consider

to not be necessarily the most desirable to a high street

now look beautiful. It's possible to make the place

look incredibly different just by updating

the frontages, harking back to the heritage as well. It's a very

historic town centre, so they've restored a lot of the heritage buildings

and They've made it feel clean, welcome, inviting,

as opposed to how it was five years ago when it didn't really feel that

way at all. They really epitomise what pride of place

needs to be about, about making it a place that people

want to go to, giving reasons for them to linger longer and

making it look appealing and attractive so you are

enticed across the threshold of the store to go in and hopefully

spend. Now, that sounds great, but actually, when you

speak to the retailers in Gainsborough, footfall is up. They are

reporting that they are seeing better trade and increased sales

and residents feel much prouder about their place again.

So if that isn't what real pride in place looks like, I don't know what

does. And it's about targeted investment,

coordinated, and it's supported by business engagement

and, of course, upskilling the businesses as well to make sure that they are

relevant and sustainable in the modern retail environment.

So my take on this is if the government really wants to spend this £5

billion effectively, they need to back more. More projects like the ones that have taken

place in Gainsborough. Building the skills, confidence, the collaboration

and not adding extra bureaucracy. I do really think that

this empowering communities to auction the empty shops can

only work if people actually want to occupy them. And if a

place doesn't look desirable and hasn't got footfall, why would anybody want to

occupy them? I mean, they're empty for a reason. Letting the locals block

tenants because they don't like the look, the signage or the sector, that's

not really local empowerment. To me, that's paralysis towards business. It doesn't

seem consistent with basic economics, supply and demand.

If a shop's going to be viable, people are going to be spending in it.

If they're not spending in it, it's not going to be viable. It will close.

Unfortunately, if the community want to have the shops that certain members

of the community don't like, I guess that's kind of tough because vacancies

don't fill themselves. You need businesses to be attracted,

you need consistent marketing to bring people back. And if you want

to change the dynamic of a town centre, it's all about the events

and the experience to keep people coming back, giving people a reason to

visit, giving people a reason to stay and giving them reasons to

keep coming back. That whole thing of, oh, let's go out to

wherever it is, there's always something fun happening there.

Otherwise the risk is really straightforward, that £5 billion will

be spent and hopefully, well, not. Hopefully,

likely as not, nothing Sustainable will be left behind. What I

would say, hopefully they can take a leaf from Gainsborough's book and

make sure that something long term and sustainable happens with that 5 billion and it

really boosts employment and local economies.

Continuing, looking at policy level, we're still waiting for the levelling up bill

amendments that's going to come out in the next Autumn statement, which is going to

be really late this year. It's set for the 26th of November and from

my point of view, thinking retail, that is very close to peak trading.

It's two days away from Black Friday. Any

personal tax rises or spending cuts at that point could shake

consumer confidence really suddenly, right when

retailers need them to be most confident. We're also looking at things

like business rates reform, skills investment and practical support

for local growth as non optional. They are

seriously essential if we want to talk about reversing decline.

There's been a lot of talk about policy and yet

retail is a people business. People buy from people.

There's a reason that people don't like self checkouts. There's a reason why

Amazon closed all of its unmanned stores recently. It's

because there's no human interaction. For a lot of people going

out to the local shop, particularly people on their own or the elderly,

and having a chat with the staff, that might be the only human

touch they have that day or even that week. I know a lady

that runs a newsagent and she said she wasn't quite sure whether she was running

a newsagent or, you know, a community service because the elderly

population would pop in to buy a paper and spend 20 minutes having a chat.

Of course they didn't mind. It was nice they had loyal customers and as long

as they weren't getting in the way of other customers. But it is important to

recognize people and that's one of the key messages from the charity Retail

Trust as well. I think it's fair to say that retail staff are

heading into the toughest stretch of the year. Theft is on the increase

because family budgets are under so much pressure. People that would never have thought of

shoplifting have done so because they just don't know where

else to go. Aggression is rising. People are so less

tolerant and stress. I mean, we saw years back

fights breaking out in certain shops over a TV and a Black

Friday deal because people were waiting and waiting and waiting for a deal

and they'd sold out. The last one was on the shelf and

people were literally wrestling over it and security staff had to step in. There's a

lot of that. And there's a lot of rudeness, just basic rudeness, towards

retail staff. There's a reason why people don't want those jobs anymore, and the reason

is it's not a particularly pleasant environment to be in. So

I believe that management and charities like the Retail Trust and

Policing as well, needs to pick up on the theme

of retail crime and help our people, because we need people to feel

happy and safe and comfortable in their

workplace. They don't need to feel threatened, especially when it's

hardly the highest paid job out there. So I think if you're a

manager or lead a team, remind them that there are free,

confidential support networks through places like the Retail Trust. And the

industry runs on people power. We might think it's

all about the spreadsheets and the margins and the calculations, but if people didn't put

stock on shelves and didn't serve customers with a smile, there'd be no sales

whatsoever. And I want to make sure that in this run up

to Christmas, we don't forget the people we need to protect the morale, their

safety and wellbeing, because I think that's even more important than chasing

sales targets, because a happy, engaged workforce deliver the sales

without even thinking about it, I guess. To wrap up today's

episode, where does that leave us? It's almost like we've

been there and done that and seen the movie. It's been Porter's pilots,

it's been Future High Street, Fund X, and now we've got pride in place.

If the government wants a different ending, it's going to need to write a

different script. And I think that that script has to be focused

on skills and capability, not grants and handouts

on business engagement and everybody getting behind a

scheme and collaborating and working together, not just bureaucracy

and ultimately creating real and sustainable success

that people can be proud of and not just coming up with slogans.

I don't think pride is something you can pay for. It's something that is

built together through the right kind of investment,

collaboration and community trust. And it is what

keeps places alive long after the photo opportunities are over.

And that's the reckoning that Westminster really needs to face this autumn.

As a final thought, I'd like to ask Rachel

Reeves to face up to her own retail reckoning. She says

she wants growth, but she can't do that by tinkering.

She's got to tackle the tax system head on. And that includes

a full reform of business rates, as has been called for

by many people. The brc, most notably for at

least a decade, if not longer. And it's also got

to make sure that large retailers are exempted

from punitively high tax bans because they're some of our most significant

employers, whilst not relieving small businesses

of the opportunity to grow through the rates relief that

she has come forward with. I do believe that the commitment

of lower business rates for retail and hospitality from 26 onwards is really

important. And what really needs to be focused on in the

November statement is no more cosmetic schemes. The final

one where I feel there's an opportunity to reverse something

that has really damaged our tourist income

through retail is VAT free shopping. People

from the usa, China and further afield used to come

for shopping tourism to places like London, Manchester, Edinburgh and so

on. And about 2 billion of sales has been lost due to that.

That money's gone elsewhere, into other countries, countries. I would really call

on the government to reconsider reversing that policy

so that we can get our tourism income back, because it's not just the shopping

income, it's the hotels, it's the eating out

and everything that goes with shopping tourism.

Rachael Reeves, if you're listening, can we have some sensible

policies in the Altman statement for retail this time? I'm Claire Bailey, the

retail champion, and you've been listening to Retail Reckoning.

Retail Reckoning

owns the floor.

Sam.